Melbourne is Australia’s fastest-growing city. Across Australia, the share of UK-born residents is declining, and the share of China-born and India-born residents has increased.
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Melbourne is Australia’s most rapidly growing city, a title it wrested from Perth around 2013-14. Several of Australia’s big cities are growing well above the national average population growth rate.
Both Donald Trump and his political opponents are on board the global infrastructure bandwagon.
Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA
The trillions of dollars spent on infrastructure demands democratic transparency and accountability. This applies to both the investment and to the effects on cities, societies and the environment.
What new and innovative infrastructure is likely to emerge from the suburbs?
Roger Keil
Suburban areas feel infrastructure stress most acutely. Having to deal with severe inadequacies, suburbs offer fertile ground for infrastructure experimentation and innovation.
The Snowy Mountain Scheme is an iconic example of postwar nation-building infrastructure. By the decade after its completion, the sell-offs were in full swing.
Lukas Coch/AAP
Long-term privatisation contracts, most of them closed to scrutiny, lock urban infrastructure into 20th-century formats unsuited for a climate-threatened planet.
Politicised projects that steamroll proper process are giving transport planning a bad name.
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Toxic industrial processes put a distance between work, home and leisure. Now, in the post-industrial era, these functions are being reunited.
Aspiring ‘smart cities’ like Barcelona have worked to build their profile – it recently hosted the Smart City Expo World Congress – but Australia may benefit from not having rushed in.
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Not only has income inequality in Australia grown over the past two decades, rich and poor are also more segregated in terms of where they live in the big cities.
The biggest risk to cities during cyclones comes from storm surge and rainfall – all the water has to go somewhere.
Dan Peled/AAP
Cities would suffer much less damage and avoid the huge financial losses if we designed them to cope with the effects of cyclones.
Informed citizens are essential to support good planning and infrastructure decisions. Marginalising urban planning gets us nowhere.
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Urban planners have been blamed for a lot of things, including higher housing costs. But the solution is to refine the process, not sideline the good planning that makes cities safe and liveable.
How does a city shape women’s feelings of safety?
Pamela Salen, XYX Lab, Monash University 2017
We now value the house as a wealth builder, not just a place to live in and raise a family. The result is a distorted investment market that makes home ownership and rental unaffordable.
Jonathan Bredin, a co-author of this article, at work.
Photo: Nathan Oxley
New rules offer the possibility of an inclusive Australian society that enables people with the highest disability-related support needs to have equal access to mainstream services including housing.
Interculturalism emphasises interaction between members of diverse communities, rather than ‘groupism’.
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Hyun Bang Shin, London School of Economics and Political Science
In a nation where urban living is the ultimate attainment, some households are bracing against the surging tide of development.
People have camped in the long grass since colonisation. From this perspective, bans on the practice are a denial of Indigenous agency, culture and rights to country.
Photo: K. Pollard
In contrast to perceptions of other homeless people sleeping rough, Darwin’s “long-grassers” are applying a long cultural tradition to deal with the situation in which they find themselves.
Federal Urban Infrastructure Minister Paul Fletcher and Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull are eyeing value capture as a way to fund projects, but how will they sell a new tax to voters?
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Consider these home truths: value capture is a tax, it would need to apply to the family home and deciding which areas it covers would be politically contentious. A broad-based land tax is simpler.